


A Waking Dream

by GustavK



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Can't forget that one, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Multi, Neil lied on his resume, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, They're the least qualified high school public teachers, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:07:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23370676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GustavK/pseuds/GustavK
Summary: But it wasn't like Neil one was to talk about messy lives. He had lied his way into the math department with a couple of forged papers and fake references. After sixteen years on the run, he wandered into Palmetto and spent the rest of his father's money on a week's worth of groceries and a used Exy stick.or: Neil find out his true niche isn't mouthing off to mob brats, but as a high school math teacher & assistant exy coach (and Andrew helps him find the rest)
Relationships: Matt Boyd/Danielle "Dan" Wilds, Neil Josten & Danielle "Dan" Wilds, Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 3
Kudos: 44





	A Waking Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Please excuse any liberties I took regarding realism of working with children in U.S. public schools. None of these goofballs would have passed a background check and we all know it. Cheers!

  


  


Palmetto Times: Online

Exy Update: Jackals Sweep Foxes in Season's Kickoff Game

Kathy Ferdinand

The Palmetto high school Foxes debuted their season with a bitterly disappointing 2-14 loss to longtime rival Breckenridge high. While Foxes head coach, Danielle Wilds, stated that the season is still too early to make predictions about the future of the Foxes' season, one can't help but to recall the Foxes record from years previous and dread the worst. The Foxes fell apart in just under ten minutes earning a yellow, then red card after the Foxes' senior captain—

  


  


Neil decidedly stopped reading and slapped his laptop closed. He pushed it far enough away from him that it nearly tottered off his kitchen counter top. Squeezing the bridge of his nose and fought the urge to write Kathy Ferdinand a strongly worded email. Only the knowledge that Wymack had most likely beaten him to it restrained him. The fact that Kathy wasn't entirely incorrect in her assessment of the Foxes current standings, in-county and playoffs, only spurred the anger brewing in his chest.

He glanced at his watch, hoping to have enough time to squeeze in a quick run to blow off steam before he had to get to school for first bell. His watch told him that the only running he was going to get was running late, and he pried himself away from his kitchen counter.

If Neil had been asked what he thought about Palmetto high school, he would have lovingly addressed it as hell-on-wheels. On paper, everything was fine. It was smack in the middle of a smack in the middle-class residential area. Got decent funding. Had good graduation rates. The students were as normal as teenagers get; administration wasn't great, but was at least predictable; and faculty tried it's damnest to get kids to pass through with as little long-term psychological damage as possible. PHS should have chugged along like every other small town high school in America, but somewhere along the way, poor little Palmetto got confused.

For the past twelve years, Palmetto seemed to have been bit with a bad-luck bug. From unexpected teacher and student deaths to sports teams with losing streaks lasting full seasons, if something unfortunate happened, you better have believe PHS was somehow involved. 

Neil fit in perfectly. 

He felt a certain kinship with Palmetto. He knew what it was like to be forced into circumstances where the only option is to play the cards you have, and he and Palmetto were making do with what they were dealt. The nauseatingly bright orange walls, the Exy court where weeds grew up through the cracks, the dilapidated gazebo that had been built for smokers, but had been conquered by stoners-- it all spoke to him. He saw himself somewhere in all of it.

And if his father's men would never think to look for a math teacher in a public high school, well, that was just an added bonus. 

Neil pulled into the faculty parking lot just as Matt and Dan were getting out of their car. He slid into the parking space across from them and they waited for him to wrestle his bag out from where it had slipped under the backseat. Matt waved at him as he approached, and slung an arm over Neil's shoulders when he was close enough.

“How are you doing this fine morning?”

Neil didn't bother to answer, and Matt sighed. “Yeah, Dan and I saw the article this morning too. Was hoping to have caught you before you did.”

Dan dragged her hand over her face. “Fucking vultures.”

Neil mumbled agreement, and let Matt drag him inside.

They arrived at the tail-end of the morning rush, and dodged harried kids rushing to make it to class in time for first bell. Both Neil and Dan got chirps of “good mornings!” as they passed current and former students.

Matt split off when they reached the front office, and they watched as he threw open the door and announced to the other receptionists, “Don't worry ladies! I am here, and more than ready for my leading role!”

Dan scoffed and shook her head. “Administration never should've let him have access to the PA system. They've turned him into a menace. It's all he talks about now.” Dan lowered her voice in a gruff imitation of Matt. “Dan, babe, you don't get it. I'm living my middle school fantasy!” 

Neil, despite his lingering annoyance, smiled. “Well, at least someone enjoys it. I probably would have to quit if someone made me do that everyday.”

“Just say the word and I can have you fired anytime you want Josten.”

Neil looked over his shoulder at Wymack. Wymack wasn't smiling, but Neil knew him well enough to know that he was kidding. He was wearing a button-up that Abby somehow managed to wrangle him into, a half-assed attempt at professionalism. His threatening aura was somewhat mitigated by the "#1 Cougar Mom" thermos he drank his morning coffee from.

"Nice mug, Wymack. Nicky get that for you?"

Wymack grunted and nodded a greeting to Dan. “Coach.”

Dan grinned. “Coach.”

“Tough one last night.” 

“You know we'll bounce back.” 

Dan had graduated from Palmetto and was hired as head coach of the Exy team as Wymack's first action after his promotion to athletic director. The blatant nepotism led to some nasty media rumors about Wymack and Dan's relationship during Dan's high school career. Both Wymack and Dan had tried to crush the gossip as quickly and brutally as they could, but people still talked. The doubts that were cast in Dan's first year as head coach was just the first stain on Dan and the Foxes that winded up turning into a whole mess. 

But it wasn't like Neil one was to talk about messy lives. He had lied his way into the math department with a couple of forged papers and fake references. After sixteen years on the run, he wandered into Palmetto and spent the rest of his father's money on a week's worth of groceries and a used Exy stick. He exhausted himself day after day on the community Exy courts, re-teaching himself the footwork and drills he distantly remembered from his little league, as well as learning a couple he picked up online. Wymack came across him a few months later, and invited him to play in an adult league with Dan, Matt, and Allison. 

Wymack, one day out of the blue, asked him what he did for a living. Neil, caught off guard without a lie at hand, admitted that he didn't have a job. Wymack had perked up as much as Wymack ever perked up, and asked him if he had any qualifications that would be applicable in a school setting. Neil desperate for some kind of an end to his lies, lied, and said he had a BA in mathematics. Wymack asked if Neil would be interested in trying his hand at tutoring high school freshmen at risk of failing basic algebra, and Neil found himself accepting. He ended up adequately meeting the school's satisfaction, and after a year and a half, got hired for a full-time position. That June, Wymack and Dan had asked to come on as an assistant coach for the school's Exy team. 

Now, as he watched Dan and Wymack stare at each other with something like hope, Neil wondered if this new life was worth it. The bell ringing pulled him out of his thoughts, and he waved a quick goodbye to Dan and Wymack. 

He walked into his first period preemptively drained from the days events. His school day started with trying to get 23 fourteen year old kids to understand the concept of linear expressions, and it was only going to get harder from there. 

About a three-quarters the way through his third period class, Nicky Hemmick knocked on his door and poked his head in. Neil stopped his lecture at the front whiteboard, and resigned himself to an unproductive last twenty minutes. Nicky was popular with students and notorious in faculty for hijacking other teacher's lesson plans with long and elaborate stories. Seeing his beaming face popping into a classroom was practically a death omen for a class lecture. Neil couldn't fathom why students found Nicky rambling for fifteen uninterrupted minutes was so interesting, but trying to stop him from disrupting class once he got started was like trying to stop rain from falling; which was to say, humanly impossible. 

Nicky closed the door behind him, and grinned unabashedly at Neil. 

“What do you want? Don't you have class right now?” Neil demanded. 

Nicky shrugged, which could've meant anything from it was his lunch period to they all met their ends in the neighboring wood-shop class.  Nicky also happened to be notorious for leaving his business and finance classes unattended—despite multiple warnings from administration. 

“But, oh! My darling Neil. Haven't you heard?” Nicky purred, and Neil felt his students eyes' bounce between him and Nicky. 

“No.” Neil replied curtly, praying to anyone who would listen that Nicky would take the hint and leave him alone, but one of the girls in the back row, (Marissa, Neil remembered) took Nicky's bait.

“Heard what?” She asked.

“Wymack sniped Kevin Day from Edgar Allen.” 

Neil's stomach dropped out from under him. “Shut up. No he didn't.” 

Nicky grinned wider, his smile all teeth. “Him  _and_ Andrew.” 

Kevin Day was the assistant coach for the Edgar Allen high school Exy team, the current mid-Atlantic champions. He and Riko Moriyama led EAHS to an unprecedented undefeated eight year reign of national and state championship wins. For Nicky to even subtly joke that Day would accept a coaching position at a school as lowly as Palmetto was sacrilegious to the entire sport of Exy. 

“Don't joke like that, Hemmick.” Neil warned, sounding faint to even his own ears. 

“I'm not joking. Andrew just called to tell me himself.” 

Neil walked back to his desk and sunk into his seat. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and texted Dan and Wymack, his fingers lightly shaking.  _Did we get Day?_

Nicky, meanwhile, kept talking. “Andrew told me that Kevin got hired here to replace Mr. Regan, because he got fired—sorry, retired early—so it's not like he was hired  _for_ Exy, but I mean, what are the odds that he  _won't_ coach?” 

Neil, who happened to have been teaching a statistics class until two minutes ago, could've given him a rough estimate, but his thoughts had fled from AP stat to the Exy court the he could see from his desk if he angled himself _just_ right.

Neil's phone buzzed and he looked down to see a text from Dan.  _WHAT!!?!!_

A kid that Neil recognized from the football team asked Nicky why Mr. Regan had gotten fired, and Nicky turned to him to delve into the lurid details of Joseph Regan's tax fraud scandal. Neil knew he should stop Nicky from breaking faculty confidentiality agreements, but his brain was still trying to play catch-up with the fact that Kevin Day was coming all the way down from West Virginia to a little unfortunate school in South Carolina. 

Neil began to type a response back, but realized what else Nicky had said. “Wait, wait, Nicky. Who's Andrew?”

Nicky, interrupting himself mid-sentence, turned back to Neil excitedly. “Andrew Minyard! He's Aaron's twin brother. He's a goalie coach at one of those delinquent reform center things in California, but he's leaving there to come here because of Kate and Aaron's baby.”

Marissa squealed, “Mr. Minyard's having a baby?”

Nicky cringed. “Shit. Don't tell him I told you guys. Anyways, he, Kevin, and Riko played on the same college team. Aaron told me that Andrew told _him_ that he was going to follow them to Court, but decided against it when Kevin broke his hands.”

Although Neil had never met Kevin or Riko, knowing their story was a side-effect of being an Exy fan. Riko and Kevin had been the faces of the sport since they were able to hold a stick, and it wasn't hard to see why. They were Gods on the court, bound for the US national team since they left the little leagues. When a nearly fatal car accident ended their collegiate careers the winter of their senior year, the world of Exy grieved, but eventually moved on. A little over a year later, they reappeared to the public eye in West Virginia, and took high school Exy by storm.

Neil's phone buzzed in his lap. Wymack had replied. _We'll talk later._

Then sent:  _But if it was Hemmick who told you, tell him I'm going to strangle him._

Neil cleared his throat and tried to ignore the vicious lurch of his heart. “Nicky, you'd better stay out of Wymack's way for the next week.”

Nicky flapped a dismissive hand. “That man loves me. So! What are we learning?”

The rest of the day's classes passed in a blur. Neil was too distracted by his own thoughts to do anything other than leave his students to their own devices, and truth be told, he didn't think they minded much. The final period of the day happened to be his planning period, and instead of using it to restructure his syllabus like he knew he should, he grabbed his bag and hustled down to Wymack's office. When he found the office locked and empty, he hustled to the athletic trainers' room.

Abby and Allison looked up as he entered, and Allison rolled her eyes. “If you're looking for Wymack, he and Dan are convalescing in the break room.”

Abby smiled at him. “Isn't it exciting news?”

Neil left, not sure if “exciting” was a good synonym for “Earth-shattering”.

The break room was empty.

“I swear to God,” Neil grumbled as he hustled to Dan's office.

Wymack wasn't there, but Dan was sitting at her desk looking blankly over paperwork. Neil knocked and didn't wait for an answer before entering. She glanced up at him and shook her head in what Neil could only read as disbelief.

“So it's really happening then?” he asked, feeling his heartbeat quicken as he realized Dan was looking over copies of Day and Minyard's resumes.   


Dan laughed, a hollow burst of air. “Yeah. Coach says that Day starts teaching next Thursday, but he'll probably be coaching by the Monday after. Minyard's going to take a little bit longer since he wants to get settled into his apartment and new job first, but otherwise, they're both ready to go. Speaking of. Did you know Aaron Minyard had a brother?”

Neil sat down across from her, thinking. Anything he knew about Aaron came from unsolicited tidbits from Nicky. However, he did supposed it was possible that Nicky had mentioned another cousin, and Neil had just tuned him out. “No, but Nicky said that he used to play with Kevin and Riko in college. I guess he's good—at least, that's how Nicky made it seem.”

Dan rested her chin on her palm in consideration. “I've never heard of him, so we'll just have to wait and see.”

Wymack chose then to walk in, and grunted a greeting at Neil. “Has Dan caught you up?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. So here's what's going on. We— and by “we”, I mean the county athletic board— have decided to create a JV Exy team here. The two have proven yourselves enough to me that I don't want either of you to leave the varsity team,” In the corner of his eye, Neil saw Dan relax a bit, and Neil realized that he probably should've considered a demotion in the wake of a legend coming to Palmetto.

Wymack continued, “So Kevin's going to be the JV head coach. Andrew, if everything works out, is going to work with our goalkeepers; both varsity and JV.” He paused to sigh. “Honestly, I know nothing about him except he's related to a couple teachers here, and that Kevin vouches for him. That's enough for me right now, but if either of you have an issue with a stranger joining our staff now's your time to voice it.”

Whether or not someone named Andrew Minyard was a competent coach was the least of Neil's current worries. “We've hired Kevin Day, _the_ Kevin Day, and all we're doing with him is making him a JV coach?” 

Wymack turned a shrewd look on him. “You got moths in your ears, Josten? Or is that just hero worship talking?” 

Neil persisted. “The potential that he's bringing—“ 

“And that's all this is right now,” Wymack interrupted, “Potential. Let's wait until he at least gets here to see what we'll be working with. this is could be a great opportunity for us, but I'm not getting my hopes up until we at least meet the man in person. I won't lie to you two. I don't know why he chose _here_ out of everywhere, and I don't know why he's insisting Minyard come with him, but I don't think any of us are in the position to look a gift horse in the mouth.” 

Neil bit his lip to smother another gush of hopeful nonsense and Wymack eyed him like he knew what Neil wanted to do. Dan thankfully intervened before Neil could embarrass himself further. 

“Sounds good, Coach.” She smiled gamely and winked when she caught Neil's eye. 

After Wymack left, they discussed the rest of the week's practice plans, and although they didn't talk any more about the Kevin Day shaped elephant in the room, Neil could tell that she was as flustered as him despite Wymack's attempts at calming them down.  By the time after-school practices started, it seemed like his and Nicky's conversation had gotten around to most of the student body. Neil felt eyes follow him as he walked to the court after grabbing his stick from his car and braced himself to deal with the team reactions. 

He and Dan tried to start practice out normally, but it became apparently clear that practice wasn't going to be productive until the rumors were addressed. They'd agreed prior to confirm Day's future appearance at the school, but only as far as he'd been accepted for a teaching position. At the end of the impromptu meeting, Dan had simply reiterated the core message behind their conversation with Wymack.

“It's going to be a day-by-day process. We'll just have to see where this all goes.” 

That night, Neil opened his laptop and searched “Kevin Day + Exy” with a heavily beating heart. Nothing announcing or indicating his imminent transfer from Edgar Allen appeared, and Neil wondered what that meant. After snooping the crevasses of the internet for anything he could find about Kevin's life for nearly an hour, he got sucked into videos of Edgar Allen game highlights and imagined the players in orange and white instead of red and black.

By the time his watch blinked 11:36pm, Neil gave up suppressing his yawns. He started to close his laptop, but hesitated, debating.  Finally, he typed “Andrew Minyard + Exy” into the search engine.

An old college roster was the first link, and Neil recognized the school name as Kevin and Riko's alma mater. He clicked on the link and scrolled through absently reading names, numbers, and positions. The last name on the list announced “#3— Minyard, Andrew: GK”, and Neil clicked on it. 

The face with bored hazel eyes was undoubtedly Andrew. Nicky hadn't mentioned that Aaron and Andrew were identical twins, but after seeing Andrew's face there was no mistaking it. He found the similarities between the picture in front of him and the face he occasionally saw in the teacher's lounge disconcerting. He realized his eyes had been tracing the shape of Andrew's cheekbones and hollows of his throat for significantly longer than strictly necessary, and minimized the photo. 

Making the executive decision to ignore why he felt vaguely voyeuristic for the time being, he scrolled down the page, reading statistics. He had to do a double-take at Andrew's wickedly high save percentage, and frowned at the deceptively low “time played” column. Something didn't add up. 

Neil opened another tab on his laptop and searched “Andrew Minyard + California”, and found what he was looking for. Andrew, it appeared, had transferred to a small school in California the spring semester of his sophomore year, just weeks after Kevin's accident. The school hadn't had an Exy team when Andrew was supposedly attending there, and Neil couldn't pretend he wasn't disappointed. He flushed a bit when he realized that he wanted to see an updated picture of Andrew, and rolled his eyes at himself. 

There was a three year gap between Andrew graduating with a double major in criminology and social work and Neil finding his name and email in the directory of staff on a juvenile correctional facility website, but Neil didn't think too much about it. It's not like social media was his forte either. His curiosity momentarily satiated, he closed his laptop and drifted to sleep. 

When his alarm woke him up the next morning, he couldn't remember what he had dreamed about, only that it had left him optimistic for the first time in a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> All I have to say about this is once a dumb jock, always a dumb jock. I apologize for the heavy exposition, but sometimes a gal's gotta do what a gal's gotta do.


End file.
